A new year has again started, and moved fast to the second month. This is my first post as Jolla CEO, and I’d like to give all of you a proper update on last years’ events and what we expect for 2017. Here we go!

As a summary, the year 2016 was a good one for Sailfish OS and full of deliveries. We launched the Aqua Fish device together with Intex Technologies in India, brought the Jolla C along with the Community Device Program for our dear community, got a major deal and partner in Russia (more about it below), and started shipping with Turing Robotics. Sailfish OS 2.0 is now fully out there and making a mark to the world.

Inside the Jolla company, we’ve been working hard to stabilize our financial situation throughout 2016. We are now a slightly smaller company than before but with the stronger-than-ever Sailfish community the results have been significant: we’ve seen many new community ports, Sailfish 64 bit has progressed nicely, and we’ve got a lot of help in translating new Sailfish OS releases. Community has also done a great effort by getting the Android 6 BSP based adaptation and newer working with Sailfish OS, which helps Sailfish OS scale more easily to newer hardware. Overall there’s been a lot of contributions to the OS. A big thanks for all our active contributors, keep it up!

Five years of Jolla

Jolla turned 5 years last October. Throughout the journey we’ve experienced several ups and downs, and even after all the struggles, we are still here together with our strong community, and with new significant partners joining the Sailfish movement.

The journey we have gone through makes us very strong and puts us in a good position to pursue new opportunities. As we all realize, Sailfish OS is not about Jolla, and thus we have a great responsibility to be very focused and perform super well on chosen items, and be ready to leave some other things on the side. Jolla and Sailfish OS now have a very focused strategy, and our aim is to seriously deliver on that. Let’s talk about that.

Licensing and regional strategy carrying fruit

During 2016 we turned our business focus tightly to regional licensing and enabling digital ecosystems in emerging markets, such as the BRICS (*) countries. We have reached first milestones in carrying out this strategy, and our first concrete case is now in full swing in Russia. We have also received a lot of interest from corporate and governmental business sectors for independent and open mobile OS development projects, and for other regional licensing cases.

I’d like to clarify a few things about our Sailfish OS project in Russia. If you’re not aware of this yet, please check out our press release or this good article in Techcrunch.

Some people have asked that does this now mean that Sailfish OS will be delivering only to Russia to serve only their purpose. Well, I tell you it simply wouldn’t work like that for anybody. We’ve established a regional licensing model and now issued a license to a Russian partner to co-develop the OS together with all of us. During 2016 we have established a fully working and professional contribution model where the Russian Sailfish developers will contribute their code back to the common Sailfish OS, which Jolla maintains independently and with open access for any interested developers and parties around the world. This also means that Sailfish OS has got new a partner who invests to the development of the code, and all users of Sailfish OS will benefit of it. It is in the interest of all parties to develop and maintain compatibility of one Sailfish OS and not to create forks.

Next up: China, Latin America, Africa and Mobile World Congress!

Following the Sailfish project in Russia, we are now looking to expand our regional licensing strategy to other markets, in particular in BRICS countries. The massive China market is a key strategic opportunity for Jolla this year, which we’ll pursue strongly. Further, we can see emerging interest to Sailfish OS from various markets like Middle-East and Africa, and the Latin American markets. The political movements of the world seem to set the scene in many ways for 2017, and we expect those movements to enable further business opportunities for the only independent mobile OS, Sailfish.

Mobile World Congress, one of the most exciting and biggest events for the mobile industry is again around the corner end of this month in Barcelona. Sailfish OS will be there in collaboration with its partners, and you can expect to hear some new exciting announcements during the week.

Meet us in Barcelona! If you are planning to attend the event, please come to visit our booth and team in Hall 5 (5H19).

Tablet refunds and open sourcing

As Juhani communicated in his year-end post, we are committed to making the 2nd round of refunds for Jolla Tablet, as soon as our financial situation permits that. We’re not quite there yet but we’re working hard to improve the financial situation to enable the rest of the refunds. I know it is a lot to ask but please bear with us on this challenging journey. We now have a good outlook for the year, and wish to finalize also this project as soon as feasible.

Previously we’ve also mentioned that we’re working on the further open sourcing of Sailfish OS. We have now taken the necessary steps and preparations to enable us to further open source Sailfish code, in particular in the areas of apps and UI. We have a decision process ongoing but you should expect exciting news on this during upcoming months.

Jolla <3 Community

It’s almost a worn-out statement already but seriously: without the Sailfish community we would not be here. Our new strategy is also much dependent on you guys & gals, and thus we want to foster the ever-stronger Sailfish community. We’re planning for further Sailfish community devices and programs to empower the community and all Jolla & Sailfish fans.

Stay tuned, we hope to announce something exciting for you already in Mobile World Congress in a few weeks. Please also keep proposing new ideas to us! We promise to listen and try to turn them into plans and implementation as much as we can with our resources and in collaboration with all the Sailfish developers.

Looking forward to serve all the fans and partners of Jolla throughout 2017, and take us to new heights and success,

Sami, cut that cr*p, please. Instead of all that BS we've all been hearing for 5 years, simply provide the God damned support for paid apps in your store, and you'll be amazed how many new developers will come to your platform and soon release hundreds to thousands of great apps. Up to twenty apps from me alone guaranteed within a few months. Only THAT can make it a great year for Sailfish OS, nothing else.

As promised, we are beginning to process the refunds further on cash flow positive months by randomly selecting a number of backers and providing them with a few of options in order to handle their refund situation. As of end of July is now at hand, we can confirm the financial situation is allowing us to start the process with 100 random backers. While admittedly that is not a huge number, it is what the situation permits us to do so far. We are determined to continue with the process each month we have a positive cash flow.

How backers get selected

Since we have decided to make this a fair play and select backers randomly, a common random generator script is executed by our sailor engineers in order to pick the selected refund backers for each round. For the moment, this is the most efficient way to compile the list, and to make the process fast.

Options

As mentioned in our summer update blog post, the randomly chosen 100 backers will be contacted via email. As we all want to believe in the success of Sailfish OS in the future, we have considered adding options in this refund round. The backers will be given three options to select from:

Receive credit for the same amount of money that they can choose to spend on future Sailfish programs. (such as using the credit for Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X, which we are considering and will confirm separately if feasible)

Donate the remaining 50% refund sum to the development of Sailfish OS

Receive the remaining 50% refund

The backers will be given a couple of weeks in order to check their details in our refund tool so that everything goes as smoothly as possible. If option 1 seem like a popular fit for our community, we can provide dedicated channels for it later. Will get back on that based on the reception we get based on offering this option.

We thereby thank you for your patience and support and hope you have had a nice summer so far.

I turned on my Jolla today for the first time for months. It told me that there is an OS update. I ran it. In the middle of it, it showed "The OS could not be updated at this time. Please try again later" and it was the last thing I saw because that cr*p didn't boot anymore. Fantastic, that's the SECOND time it happened to me on a device I don't even use. I'll flush the damn thing down the toilet, I swear.

-

EDIT: I was able to revive it using Recovery Mode, so it won't go down the toilet, at least not yet. But of course the "Restore to factory state" option brought me back to Sailfish OS version 1.0.0.5 from Anno Domini 2013, which is just HORRIBLE. It now tells me that there is an update to 1.0.2.5 available, so - just as I thought - now I will need to go though ALL THE F***ING OS UPDATES FROM THE LAST THREE YEARS as Jolla does not think it would be any wiser to make it possible to simply reflash it once with the latest release, or at least to make it possible to download one cumulative update to the latest version at once. UNBELIEVABLE.

A phone that fails by itself in the middle of a regular OS update and no longer boots is a horror, but that it then requires to spend long hours manually downloading and installing GIGABYTES of all OS updates that came out in its history, one by one, is so PITIFUL that I just don't know how to describe it. It was a nightmare when I had to restore it two years ago, so I just can't imagine how much work it'll take now that some further major OS updates came out since then.

EDIT2: Just see below what a poor Jolla user has to go through in 2017 when his beloved technological masterpiece goes belly up BY ITSELF for absolutely NO REASON (which happened to me already for the second time, and that on a phone I use almost exclusively to update it to the latest OS version from time to time and other than that it only catches dust powered off, so I can't imagine how it looks if one normally uses it). I'm scared to think how many more updates it will take to install if the God damned junk gets bricked in 2018 or beyond. Whole night won't suffice to restore it.

02:00 Made the damn thing bootable again using Recovery Mode. It took restoring it to factory state, i.e. OS 1.0.0.5 from 2013.
02:10 Had to go through that damn initial setup (setting up WLAN, Jolla account, etc)
02:38 Downloading OS update to 1.0.2.5
02:42 Installing OS update to 1.0.2.5
02:43 Don't know what it did, probably nothing, as it rebooted after less than one minute. Now it wants to download OS update to 1.0.2-10.12.5.jolla
02:44 Downloading OS update 1.0.2-10.12.5.jolla
02:45 Installing OS update 1.0.2-10.12.5.jolla
02:51 Downloading OS update 1.1.2.16
02:58 Installing OS update to 1.1.2.16
--- an hour wasted already at this point ---
03:10 Downloading OS update 1.1.7.28
03:25 Installing OS update 1.1.7.28
03:40 Downloading OS update 1.1.9.30 (aka SFOS 2.0)
03:48 Installing OS update 1.1.9.30
04:00 Wasting time on having to go through the SFOS 2.0 Tutorial that cannot be skipped in any apparent way that I could find.
04:05 Wasting even more time while the default Jolla apps (that I already installed in version 1.0.0.5) get reinstalled once again for reasons only known to Jolla. A bunch of errors like "Store Error. Application XXX is already in the current version". Additionally, it installed some Android app stores (Aptoide and such) that I explicitly selected NOT to install.
--- two hours wasted already at this point ---
04:10 Downloading OS update 2.0.0.10
04:17 Installing OS update 2.0.0.10
04:30 Downloading OS update 2.1.1.24
04:42 Installing OS update 2.1.1.24
05:00 End of OS updates. Now restoring backups, i.e. some further 15-20 minutes.

--- total time wasted to bring back the Jolla to the state it was before it corrupted ITSELF: 3,5 hours without any breaks, 90% of which was spent on repeatedly downloading unnecessary intermediate updates ---

Isn't it just INSANE? Do I need to mention that on EVERY other phone I've ever used (Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo, PocketPC, Windows Phone, Android, even Ubuntu Phone), in case of any problems it only takes reflashing it ONCE with a single most recent OS version?

Please don't tell me that it is NORMAL.

Oh, I've read that Jolla (after complaints from countless users) PROMISED to change this behavior (so that "Restore to factory settings" allows reverting to the LATEST installed OS version rather than OLDEST one) already in mid 2014. And of course they didn't keep their promise, as with everything else. On a device so prone to get so easily bricked just by itself, failing to do absolutely any improvements to the recovery/restore process since 2013 is just unbelievable.

In total, I had to download and install SEVERAL GIGABYTES of updates. A real pleasure if one's away from home and has to do it via mobile data. I'm also wondering how having to install so many updates at once wears out eMMC memory cells.

===

Oh, and I've also learned one more interesting thing. Stubborn refusal to allow commercial apps in the store apparently isn't enough for Jolla. To make their platform even more "attractive" when it comes to availability of apps, they recently banned autostarting native apps in their store. Just to compare, some 70% of my applications for BB10 are autostarting headless apps and they wouldn't make any sense if they could not autostart. That's the most bizarre platform I've ever seen.

Somehow you really have bad luck with your Jolla. I never had any issues with updates and I'm in the early access group. I needed to do a factory reset only once as I applied to many patches and removed others and so got my device into a somewhat weird state. This reset and installing all those updates was really a pain. But I'm still using my Jolla as primary and daily phone and am still quite happy with it. For almost 4 yeary now. I'd like to switch to a Sony Xperia X compact (with SFOS) as successor.

Well, I don't really believe in such a thing as 'bad luck'. If something broke then only because it was prone to it, and the conditions were met. A quick look at TJC.com shows me that I am not the only one whose Jolla did so by itself and for no reason. My Jolla had less than a dozen apps installed from the Jolla store and not much besides. A regular OS update bricked it.

Anyway, as I wrote, that it bricked itself was one thing, but that the recovery process still reverts to the oldest OS version from 2013 and then still takes spending 3,5 hours on downloading all the major updates released between 2013 and 2017 and installing them one by one is another story. I don't think it could be done in a worse way and I am not familiar with ANY other OS vendor having ever done so.

Tap once in every corner going clockwise starting in upper left corner.

Good to know (even though I really hope I won't have to go through it ever again). Thank you!

But wouldn't it be much better if there simply was a "Skip this Tutorial" button on its first screen, like everyone else does it? I can't imagine how they could have chosen to waste time on coding such a hidden "Easter Egg" to skip the tutorial (that hardly anyone will know and use) rather than add a simple clickable button/link visible to everyone. They always have to do things THEIR WAY, which - sadly - nearly always turns out to be a wrong way. I don't think that's what their #unlike slogan was originally meant to mean.

The latest step of Jolla - i.e. the paid beta OS for Xperia XZ is pretty fascinating, especially since they caution about several features not working.

I am still watching Sailfish as a potential candidate OS but this company must get their act together - I would rather prefer it to be sold to either Chinese or Russian interests if the current situation persists. If they really want to support Sony hardware I would say that they should talk to them about making a "Jolla Edition" or at least sign the images so they can be flashed using a flashing tool on an Xperia with locked bootloader.

The major issue with unlocking the BL on newer Xperia devices is the deletion of DRM keys, which affect the camera and also eliminate some other features - especially now that Sony start to make their apps looking for them on boot (the latest Sony Album updates do this and just FCs if they aren't present).

It is also telling with this "Android compatible" level of marketing. I.e. I should buy a new Sony, unlock the bootloader and flash Sailfish (paid....) and rely on my apps being coded for Android 4.2.2 (or else they won't work) and all of this because the company didn't bother with a native ecosystem but rather a lot of "less intelligent" people defending this omission using arguments such as "they are a small company without resources". I.e. making excuses on behalf of Jolla, giving as bad taste as all those making it on behalf of Apple.

Sailfish will be a competitor when the following happens:

1. Support for paid apps in a proper app store.
2. Cooperation with OEMs about making "Jolla Editions" of certain devices (or even buying off-the-shelf devices from someone like TCL and slap a Jolla logo on and install Sailfish).
3. Using proper hardware (i.e. not Snapdragon 210 and similar even if some "less intelligent" users INSIST that the system "is smooth" on such a CPU - it says more about them than the system). A Snapdragon 660 or 8xx series SF device is necessary for it to be taken seriously.
4. Revving down the "Android compatibility" in favor of focus on native apps.
5. Providing tools for conversion of Android apps into native SF ones.
6. Look into the possibility to fork the ART runtime and make a "Jolla edition" of it together with conversion tools for new Android apps (i.e. something similar to when Apple made Carbon in order to facilitate conversion of classic Mac OS apps for Mac OS X operation).

A "Jolla ART" solution could assist with building the ecosystem, especially if it is promoted as a way of getting Android apps into the store. It doesn't mean sideloading of APKs but conversion including removal of Play Services dependencies (i.e. the app is calling on Jolla services instead).

If this company doesn't get their act together I can only hope for a Chinese partner or something to buy them - the system could gain a lot of marketshare if it is used for that market and then being exported in a "Westernized" version. Jolla could stay in Finland but make two distinct flavors - one "Baidu/Weibo version" for China and an "International" one for the rest of the world.

The system itself is interesting but seriously let down by Jolla (and some of their users - namely those who make excuses on behalf of the company such as defending Snapdragon 210 hardware to be "enough" etc, constantly bashing Android in the process).

My dream about Sailfish devices from "Nokia" remain, though. Jolla should work with HMD/Nokia about making it happen - i.e. start out with a flashable SF-ROM and later start with "Nokia x Jolla Edition". The ability to flash the system on the new Nokia 8 and upcoming 9 would be great.

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